In a recent interview with New York Magazine, Soon-Yi Previn, the wife of controversial director Woody Allen, spoke publicly for the first time since the beginning of their controversial relationship. In the story, 47-year-old Previn said she feels her adoptive mother Mia Farrow has been using the #MeToo movement to smear Allen.

Previn was adopted by Farrow and her former husband André Previn (who refused to comment for the story, but in a 2013 Vanity Fair story, said of his daughter, “she does not exist”) when she was six years old, from South Korea. The pair had three biological children, and adopted two others along with Previn.

By the time Previn was 11, Farrow had divorced André and began dating Allen, who started a relationship with Previn when she was 21 — while he was still seeing Farrow.

Previn said she chose to speak now due to Farrow and Allen’s daughter Dylan’s renewed child molestation accusations, saying, “I was never interested in writing a Mommie Dearest, getting even with Mia — none of that,” said Previn. “But what’s happened to Woody is so upsetting, so unjust. (Mia) has taken advantage of the #MeToo movement and paraded Dylan as a victim. And a whole new generation is hearing about it when they shouldn’t.”

At one point, Allen jumped in, “I am a pariah. People think that I was Soon-Yi’s father, that I raped and married my underaged, retarded daughter.”

In the interview, Previn went on to recall her time in an abusive orphanage before her adoption, and then claimed Farrow was often abusive. Even in recalling the first time they met, when Farrow threw her arms around the six-year-old at the orphanage, Previn said, “I’m standing there rigidly, thinking, ‘Who is this woman, and can she get her hands off of me?’ She didn’t ring true or sincere.”

She went on to say Farrow played favourites among her 10 children, taking preference to those with blond hair and blue eyes. Previn alleged she would spank and slap her, throw blocks at her while teaching her English if she didn’t get the words right, and sometimes held her upside down from her feet to get the blood to drain to her head because she thought “it would make me smarter.”

Previn’s adoptive brother Moses made similar statements regarding Farrow earlier this year. However, during their 1993 custody battle, the judge found Farrow to be a “caring and loving parent,” and Allen to be “self-absorbed, untrustworthy and insensitive,” ruling his behaviour toward Dylan “grossly inappropriate grossly and…measures must be taken to protect her.” Over the years, Farrow has denied any claims of abuse.

Though she declined to recall a single positive memory with Farrow in the interview, Previn does acknowledge that when her mother discovered their relationship after finding nude photographs of Previn on Allen’s mantel, “it would have been horrible for her.”

But, she added, “we were both consenting adults,” and that, sure, there “could be something very Freudian” about the fact that Allen left them out for anyone to see.

At one point, Previn interrupts Allen with a laugh as he explains his original attraction to Farrow: “(Allen) is a poor, pathetic thing. He’s so naïve and trusting, he was probably putty in her hands. One thinks that he’s so brilliant … and yet on certain things he’s so shockingly naïve it makes your head spin and you think he’s putting it on. Mia was waaay over his head.”

The interview, published late Sunday, immediately set off a torrent of negative social media, with Dylan tweeting, “Thanks to my mother, I grew up in a wonderful home, filled with love, that she created. I have a message for the media and allies of Woody Allen: no one is ‘parading me around as a victim’ — I continue to be an adult woman making a credible allegation unchanged for two decades, backed up by evidence.”

Dylan also shared a statement from herself, and her siblings Matthew, Sascha, Fletcher, Daisy, Ronan, Isaiah and Quincy: “We love and stand by our mom, who has always been a caring and giving parent. None of us ever witnessed anything other than compassionate treatment in our home.”

Journalist Ronan Farrow, who has spearheaded much of the #MeToo movement in his coverage of Harvey Weinstein, also tweeted his love and support for his mother, calling the interview a “hit job.”

The interview, it’s worth noting, was conducted by Daphne Merkin, a friend of Allen’s for over 40 years. In a follow-up tweet, New York Magazine said it had acknowledged this fact and that Previn “is entitled to be heard.”